How do I properly use the "required fields" function in PDF Forms? - As it was designed...no add-on's or scripts as solutions please

Question

I am posting for the first time on this forum, and I apologize if this has been answered, but I did not find this forum easy to use at all, and I don't have a lot of time to spend finding a simple "how-to" answer (which should be really easy to find in my opinion).

My problem started when I created a bunch of forms and set some fields to be "required", only to find out that's not really doing anything, unless I use "Submit". I don't know anything about submit. We make our forms available to the public and ask them to fill them out and submit them to us via email or to a dropbox. If there is a formal submit feature in Adobe, I don't know anything about it, so I'm looking for a how-to that explains how this is "supposed" to work. I have already seen many solutions that provide scripts to create the functionality that people are asking for, but I don't want to get involved in learning new tools right now. I just need to understand how this was designed to work in the first place, and then I can work from there. If someone can point me to a how-to on the required field option and using submit, that would be so helpful. Thank you so much!

George_Johnson · Answer

The required property was added back when PDF forms were first introduced. At that time, the only way to submit was if the form was displayed in a browser and the form was set up to submit the form data to a web server. If a required field was blank, the submit was not allowed to take place. This wouldn't work as you might expect for fields like check boxes, radio buttons, and list boxes since these fields always have a value (unselected = "Off"). As you've seen, you can use JavaScript to check to see if fields are different than their default (or some other) value, and only proceed with the submit action if everything checks out. Relying just on the basic behavior is OK if you're only dealing with a few text fields, but it can easily become inadequate and clumsy for larger and more complex forms with other types of fields. I can't recall the last time I've used it.

Through the years, it has become possible for Reader to "submit" the entire by email and for Reader users to save a completed form and somehow (email, upload, etc.) send it in. In many cases there is no specific submit action that takes place so that the form can be automatically checked for completeness, but you can always provide a means for the user to check the form before they send it in. This can be done with scripting, and it really needs to be tailored to the form. I do this sort of thing all the time and both the users and recipients find it very helpful. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a specific tutorial on the subject that I can point you to.

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